As computer technology and the Internet have taken on increasingly important roles in people's lives, Internet users are beginning to demand not only enhanced productivity, but also enhanced recreational activities and a greater sense of community. A variety of programs and services have been created to meet these demands, including Internet chatting and instant messaging, streaming audio, file sharing capabilities and multi-player network games. Unfortunately, while these applications allow users to communicate in a variety of ways with friends and peers, they fail to provide users with a sense of community and a shared relationship.
A number of instant messaging programs are now commercially available, and their popularity is indicative of consumers' need to instantly communicate with friends and acquaintances. Different applications provide different levels of functionality, but most of these programs allow a user to: send and receive text messages to/from a remote user, send and receive files to/from a remote user, and initiate group chatting sessions to which the user can then add participants. Through these programs, a user can discover whether or not a friend is available for communication, and, if so, trade text messages back and forth. These programs thereby give the user a sense of constant connectivity, but through a medium requiring far less attention than a phone for example. While these applications are in many ways successful mediums for communication, they fail to provide participants with a sense of community or context within which their relationship can evolve. While many chatting programs allow contacts to be grouped into “buddy lists,” this set of contacts does not necessarily know of each other's existence nor do they necessarily share activities with each other. In other words, the only sense of community is imposed by one user onto his or her contacts without permission, or the other participants' knowledge. Furthermore, this grouping of contacts is a mere listing and does not facilitate group activities or interaction, further impeding the development of a sense of community.
Other currently available recreationally oriented applications include file-sharing programs. These programs enable users to download and upload (and thereby share) files with members of the public (normally whoever is running the same program at that time). When the program is running, these users may often also have the opportunity to chat with other users of the service, but an intimate persistent relationship between a particular user and a small select group of users is lacking. Unlike physical relationships, the “community” in this setting is quite large (normally encompassing thousands of users) and non-selective. A user cannot easily choose with whom to interact. Moreover, a user's relationship with other users is necessarily limited to file sharing and chatting in a public room, thereby limiting other forms of interaction that might be desirable.
Finally, multi-player games that allow users at home to play with and against remote users are becoming ever more popular. From traditional games of chess involving two opponents and a number of observers to “first-person shooters” involving dozens of opponents, there are many possible venues of interaction, and many modern games give users the ability to chat concurrently. Participation in these games, and the knowledge that other players share at least this interest with the user, may give users a slightly greater sense of community than was previously available. Many games provide the capability of forming private arenas in which a group can play and chat together. However, the users' sense of community is stunted by the extent to which their interactions with each other are limited. In particular, users may form a group to game with at one site, but continually have to set up the group each time they want to play. The group is thus not persistent, nor is it mobile. That is, the group cannot be taken intact to other activities like another game or even an online journal. Each time, the user has to form the group.
While users of gaming environments are able to play games with each other and chat at the same time, they typically cannot interact in other ways. They are also typically unaware of the other users' presence unless they interact through another chatting program. In addition, in order to interact at all, the players must be involved in an attention-grabbing game, making less intrusive activity sharing impossible. Thus, while multi-player games are successful at creating a gaming community, they are unsuccessful at creating the relaxed, social community that many consumers might hope to form.
There is a need for a group communication application through which an intimate group of users can interact with each other in any number of ways, and through which users can depend on a constant connection to a small select group of friends who will share these activities with each other. Such a system would give the Internet generation a sense of constant social connection and a shared relationship with their friends similar in many ways to those developed in the physical world.